alt Hacker NewsWe've raised $17M to build what comes after Git
Comments
- leads with amount of money raised - mentions a16z - i use git every single day and have no idea what exactly the thing will do
they aren't building something to help you, they're building something to trap you. even if it's free, does things you like, etc., do not use it. their end goal is to screw you
The tool that could replace git must free, ubiquitous, and arguably open-source. This is why I cannot imagine how raising $17M may pay for itself in that case, to say nothing of a 10× return.
It may be a great tool, but I'd be very reluctant to use a closed-source solution as a cornerstone of infrastructure.
A lot of people seem confused about how they raised the money, but it’s actually a pretty easy VC pitch.
- It’s from one of GitHub’s cofounders.
- GitHub had a $7.5B exit.
- And the story is: AI is completely changing how software gets built, with plenty of proof points already showing up in the billions in revenue being made from things like Claude Code, Cusor, Codex, etc.
So the pitch is basically: back the team that can build the universal infrastructure for AI and agentic coding.
I recently switched to Jujutsu (jj) and it made me realize that “what comes after Git” might already exist.
It turns out the snapshot model is a perfect fit for AI-assisted development. I can iterate freely without thinking about commits or worrying about saving known-good versions.
You can just mess around and make it presentable later, which Git never really let you do nicely.
Plus there’s essentially zero learning curve, since all the models know how to use JJ really well.
Installed GitButler to try it out — and realized it installs malicious Git hooks to take over the git commit workflow:
* pre-commit — The malicious one. It intercepted every `git commit` attempt and aborted it with that error message, forcing you to use `but commit` instead. Effectively a commit hijack — no way to commit to your own repo without their tool.
* post-checkout — Fired whenever you switched branches. GitButler used it to track your branch state and sync its virtual branch model. It cleaned this one up itself when we checked out.
* There's also typically a prepare-commit-msg hook that GitButler installs to inject its metadata into commit messages, though we didn't hit that one.
* The pre-commit hook is the aggressive one — it's a standard git hook location, so git runs it unconditionally before every commit. GitButler installs it silently as part of "setting up" a repo, with no opt-in. The only escape (without their CLI) is exactly what we did: delete it manually.
I personally feel that:
1) Git is fine
2) I would not want to replace critical open source tooling with something backed by investor capital from its inception.
Sure, it will be “open source “, but with people throwing money behind it, there’s a plan to extract value from the user base from day one.
I’m tired of being “the product”.
Critical open source tooltips by should spring from the community, not from corporate sponsorship.
Those who don't understand git are bound to reinvent it. Git is fine as it is, with some porcelain and QoL improvements here and there. Some of the most capable devs I know use git + cgit for collaboration and they manage just fine.
First off, I'm of course interested to see what the future infrastructure of software building next looks like.
> The hard problem is not generating change, it’s organizing, reviewing, and integrating change without creating chaos.
Sure, writing some code isn't the bottleneck. Glossed over is the part where the developer determines what changes to make, which in my experience is the most significant cost during development and it dwarfs anything to do with version control. You can spend a lot of energy on the organising, reviewing, patching, etc. stuff -- and you should be doing some amount of this, in most situations -- but if you're spending more of your development budget on metaprojects than you think you should be, I don't think optimising the metatooling is going to magically resolve that. Address the organisational issues first.
> This is what we’re doing at GitButler, this is why we’ve raised the funding to help build all of this, faster.
The time constraint ("faster") is, of course, entirely self-imposed for business reasons. There's no reason to expect that 'high cost + high speed' is the best or even a good way to build this sort of tooling, or anything else, for that matter.
Git's UI has become increasingly friendly over a very long time of gradual improvements. Yes, Mercurial was pretty much ideal out of the gate, but the development process in that case was (AFAIK) a world away from burning money and rushing to the finish.
Maybe going slow is better?
Why does it take $17m to beat Git?
How will you ever get the network effects needed to get sustained users with a commercial tool?
Given Git was created because BitKeeper, a commercial tool, pulled their permission for kernel developers to use their tool aren’t we ignoring a lesson there?
Honest question. I love some of the additional capabilities and specifically the dependency commits, virtual branches, and JSON output...
BUT why not just work with the git community to add this functionality? It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that needs to "replace" git, as opposed to "improve" git?
The only security incident I've had in my career was due to Git Butler - it committed temporary files into GitHub without me explicitly approving it! Of course, it was a private repository, but still, it became impossible to delete those secrets because there were plenty of commits afterward. Given the large file tree and many updated files in the commit, it wasn't apparent that those folders got sneaked into the commit.
So, I really hope security incidents don't come after Git!
"What comes after Git" looks inside
Git CLI with flowers and unicorns.
Is this what gets funded nowadays? I really hope for a gigantic mega crash of all the IT companies. This industry deserves it like none other.
To all the salty people- the person cofounded GitHub. It's not the product that raised 17M, it's the person.
For a long time I couldn't decide if Git Butler was a real product or a very elaborate joke to get devs to type "but rub" into their terminal.
https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/rubbing
I like their vision, though, this is compelling to me:
> What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is to work alone?
It generally _is_ easier to work alone with git. UI and DX experiments feel worthwhile. lazygit and Magit are both widely used and loved, for example, but largely focus on the single user experience.
I actually believe we need to rethink Git for modern needs. Saving prompts and sessions alongside commits could become the norm for example, or I could imagine having different flags for whether a contribution was created by a human or not.
This doesn't seem to be the direction these guys are going though, it looks like they think Git should be more social or something.
Nowadays I just ask my LLM butler to "organize outstanding changes into coherent commits". No new software needed.
I like what I see in the video, it would solve a lot of problems I end up having with git.
That said, I find the branding confusing. They say this is what comes after git, but in the name and the overall functionality, seems to just be an abstraction on top of git, not a new source control tool to replace git.
The remaining lifetime of a technology is proportional to how long it has already existed.
However good this new thing might be, however much better it might be than git - I don't like it's chances.
The source code is hosted on Github: https://github.com/gitbutlerapp/gitbutler
I was really hoping we'd see some competition to Github, but no, this is competition for the likes of the Conductor App. Disappointed, I must say. I am tired of using and waiting for alternatives of, Github.
The diff view in particular makes me rage. CodeMirror has a demo where they render a million lines. Github starts dying when rendering a couple thousand. There are options like Codeberg but the experience is unfortunately even worse.
Genuinely curious about the collaboration model here. Git's biggest weakness isn't technical — it's that merge conflicts are a social problem disguised as a technical one. Two people editing the same file usually means the ownership boundaries are wrong, not that the VCS is.
What does "what comes after Git" look like for a two-person team vs. a 200-person org? The pain points are completely different.
The amount of ~skepticism~ hate is astounding here!! People don’t even acknowledge that it’s written in RUST!!!!
Seems fine I guess. I'm not a fan of Perforce but it does have some features that git still struggles with and needs to address to break into new customers. This Gitbutler seems to address some of them but I can't say it really feels next gen.
I like the idea of parallel branches. I feel like you could probably get away with just creating multiple, named stages but having a full history is nice. P4 has multiple pending CLs and it works nicely enough. This sounds a bit better so that's cool.
As far as "social coding" git's design is really at odds with any sort of real time communication. I would love to see a first class support for file locking, and file status work flows. It's not big at all in code dev because code can be merged but for non-coders, source controlled assets are often not mergeable. To solve this, P4 is often used with heavily integrated tools that provide live file status (Locked, out of date, edited by others). This way merge conflicts are prevented at author time. Git is really lacking here. Is fetching constantly really the best we can do?
Then of course... can we get some large file and partial checkout workflows that don't feel good?
Real question--- why does one of the GitHub co-founders need to raise 17M for a venture? I'm certain they could fund it themselves. Is this more or less a marketing play than anything else?
I thought git didn’t allow companies to use git in their name any more and grandfathered in girhub, gitlab, etc. How did this company get a trademark.
Also, I don’t think I would use this and the problems they describe aren’t really things I care much about.
I wish them the best, but $17m on a devtools company that thinks they are replacing git is going to be rough going.
Git just works. If you're not really familiar with it, you can use a free UI. If you don't know anything about it, AI like ChatGPT or Claude can help you commit or even teach you Git.
If you raise money for this project, you probably intend to make money in the near future. I don’t think anyone here wants ads on Git or to argue with a manager to get the premium version of GitButler just because you reached the commit limit.
These $17M should go to the Git maintainers.
> Imagine your version control tool taking what you’ve worked on and helping you craft logical, beautiful changes with proper context
This is actually really important/useful, it's just not apparent to people who haven't worked on AI agents.
AI agents do a lot of work under the hood to try to save your tokens. There are two basic methods: 1) semantic knowledge maps, 2) PageRank. Agents like Aider will build a semantic knowledge graph of your codebase - the files in it, the functions, variables, etc - so that it can tell the agent exactly where everything is in a tiny summary. It'll also then use PageRank to build a graphed rank of these things, to surface the most relevant items first. (https://aider.chat/2023/10/22/repomap.html)
A modern VCS could do all of these things for you too, and the result should be making it easier to work with code, pulling in the related context simultaneously, so your changes make sense.
I don't have to read the article to know that if it not just git with fixes and new features, it's not going to pan out. This is like building a new house because your current house needs a couple of leaks fixed and a coat of paint.
Claims about “what comes after git” aside, I really like the idea of virtual branches. Worktrees have a pitfall IMO that they don’t allow you to test changes in a running local env, meaning I need to commit the changes, close the worktree, and checkout the branch on my primary workspace to verify.
Gitbutler virtual branches OTOH appear to provide branch independence for agents/commits, while simultaneously allowing me to locally verify all branches together in a single local env. This seems quite a bit nicer than checking out worktree branches in the primary workspace for verification, or trying to re-run local setup in each worktree.
i dont get it, watched the video seeing the "power" of using multiple branches at the same workdirectory etc. all i was thinking was ok they want to make it easy for coding agents work with multiple branches / feautres at once... Just that works already pretty well with git and worktrees... and agent uses the tools anyway... dont know what they want to build with 17M
I failed to see why this would be something that "comes after Git" from a VCS perspective.
The line-based diff(1)/diff3(1)/patch(1) kit often works, and that mindset thrives and gets carried till today. Many toolkits and utilities have been designed to make it more ergonomic, and they are good. Jujutsu is an example. We also have different theories and implementations, some even more algebraically sound like Darcs and Pijul.
But GitHub the Platform is another story, given that they struggled to achieve 90% availability these days.
Maybe the pitch is:
git is distributed. Decentralised improvement. Local computers and their users make changes. These steps of local added value are then centrally combined into a shared timeline. A single product. During the improvement the locus of control is local. Which means it is hard to harvest the knowledge of this local knowledge and replace it. And it's hard to make local users serve the central AI.
Not something you put in the public mission statement. Because you might get boycotts.
How I'm using git/Github has changed with agentic coding. However, I'm not using swarms of agents to write code, so it's bit hard for me to decipher the JTBD of gitbutler.
Another take I've seen is https://agentrepo.com/, which is light-weighted hosted git that's easy for agents to use (no accounts, no API keys, public repos are free). There are large parts of the GitHub experience I'm no longer using (mostly driving from Claude), so I think this is an interesting take.
I thought gitbutler was not a great name, but then I saw their CLI command name is "but"
No shade on these guys, looks like a cool tool and I'll try it. However, I find myself doing large majority of my git operations using a an agent[1] or a TUI [2], and I rarely open a git interface. I can get everything done straight from the terminal.
I guess I can overcome the "what if I cannot undo" anxiety.
[1] https://getcook.dev [2] lazygit
My only issue is the title. It appears they are building a replacement for GitHub of which a replacement for Git is just a component. Building a replacement for GitHub is going to need at least the sort of funding they are mentioning. So once one reads the article it makes a bit more sense.
I do not understand the problem solution, but if anything with git, I would want Codeberg style. I moved to gitlab and they were soldout and I am back on github slowly transitioning out. Common sentiment I believe is we want git, but on our own terms, not another VC funded project to move in.
As long as this tool doesn't break "fast forward merge" and proper linear history and allows you do delete PRs unlike its GitHub progenitor then I'm happy.
I have found that a number of times GitHub's idea of "convenient" comes either from 1) not understanding git fundamentals such that it closes off possible workflows, or 2) pushing a philosophy on users, i.e. I know better than you, so I'm going to block you.
Wow. So much hate in the comments here. Of all the funding / equity events lately, I wonder how this one gets so much doubt and distrust from the start.
If this isn’t something to at least root for, in the sense of a small team, novel product, serving a real need, then I dunno what is. You can use jj or tangled and still appreciate improvements to git and vcs on the web in general. Competition amongst many players is a good thing, even if you don’t believe in this one particular vision.
Heaven forbid it isn’t 100M going to a YC alum for yet another AI funding raise.
Why are investors still investing in SAAS products like this? I've heard some investors made rather blunt statements about such investments being a very hard sell to them at this point. Clearly somebody believes differently here.
We have AI now. AI tools are pretty handy with Git. I've not manually resolved git conflicts in months now. That's more or less a solved problem for me. Mostly codex creates and manages pull requests for me. I also have it manage my GitHub issues on some projects. For some things, I also let it do release management with elaborate checklists, release prep, and driving automation for package deployment via github actions triggered via tags, and then creating the gh release and attaching binaries. In short, I just give a thumbs up and all the right things happen.
To be blunt, I think a SAAS service that tries to make Git nicer to use is a going to be a bit redundant. I don't think AI tools really need that help. Or a git replacement. And people will mostly be delegating whatever it is they still do manually with Git pretty soon. I've made that switch already because I'm an early adopter. And because I'm lazy and it seems AI is more disciplined at following good practices and process than I am.
Jumping on the bandwagon, Magit is raising $$$ to Keep Version Control Magical https://github.com/magit/magit/issues/5555
jj is rapidly becoming the new standard for post-git VCS in my circles. I’d love to see more startups working on that.
I'm trying to estimate how much better than git a new system would have to be to convince me to abandon git and learn the new system
I don't know the answer, but I think it could easily be three times as good and I would still stick with git
Hey, this is Scott - the guy in the photo who wrote this post. AMA.
No CLI installer for Windows.
App itself for Windows won't proceed past my selected repo. Said something about bad permissions, but I use that repo every day.
It’s weird because I could see raising money on the premise that GitHub is garbage, not git. But then you can’t say I co-founded GitHub as your bona fides.
Huh. I look at what it took to build Git to begin with[1] and have to wonder if the thing that comes after it is really going to be _that much_ better. Git came about because there was a need for it. I feel like GitButler came about because there was a need for funding. Maybe I just need to have my coffee before commenting.
Git isn't that old. I find it interesting people want to replace it by big money. Does this say something about the quality of git? Enough people also complain about that.
I'm reminded of a comedy album, "The First Family", from the 1960s where Bobby Kennedy impersonator wanted to form a new political party. He named it something like "Major Affiliate For an Independent America" (I might have that wrong.) Or the M-A-F-I-A.
He said their first order of business was to change the name of the organization.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwu8S6Ekx9w
EDIT: I'm not positive that's the correct album but have a good laugh anyway.
X is hard to use because when something goes wrong you need to have a deep knowledge to figure it out! Let's build Y on top of X to make this easy! Now you just need to have deep knowledge of both Y and X to figure problems out. And it's gonna cost $17M to build Y. Deal?
I watched the demo video on the git butler home page and agree with the premises that:
1. git is not going away 2. git UX is not great
So i appreciate their effort to manage development better as agents make it possible to churn out multiple features and refactors at once.
BUT, I reject this premise:
3. Humans will review the code
As agents make it possible to do so much more code (even tens of files sucks to review, even if it’s broken into tiny PRs), I don’t want to be the gatekeeper at the code review level.
I’d rather some sort of policy or governance tooling that bullies code to follow patterns I’ve approved, and force QA to a higher abstraction or downstream moment (tests?)
> The old model assumed one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow. Not only has the problem not been solved well for that old model, it’s now only been compounded with our new AI tools.
A bit of a strange thing to say in my book. Git isn't SVN and I think these problems are already solved with git. I agree that the interface is not always very intuitive but Git has the infrastructure which is very much focused on supporting alternatives to "one person, one branch, one terminal, one linear flow".
> the problem that Git has solved for the last 20 years is overdue for a redesign.
To me it's not clear what the problem is that would require a redesign.